Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
The 22 Best Sci-Fi Movies on Peacock in September 2024: The Amazing Spider-Man, Us, They Live & More
Peacock has a collection of new and old titles, including some of our science fiction faves!
Stories are the way we talk about the things we’re not good at talking about: love, death, fear, hope... We build proxies for ourselves that are better-looking, braver, or cleverer than we are, and we put them in the situations we can only imagine in order to explore the world as it is or as we wish it could be. Science fiction, more than perhaps any other genre, extends this unique form of cultural meditation to our own possible future.
Through science fiction, we see the ways the world might one day be, and we can make mistakes on page or screen in the hope that we don’t make them when they really come knocking. Because we can only build what we can first imagine, we’d serve ourselves well by sampling the many different potential futures available in our fictions.
If you’re looking for inspiration, Peacock’s collection of science fiction movies and television series might be the perfect place to start. To be sure, not all sci-fi flicks present an ideal future, and they might serve you better as a warning than a blueprint, but either way you’re sure to have a blast along the way. There are scores of movies and hundreds of episodes of science fiction to choose from, these are but some of our favorites.
What are the best sci-fi movies now streaming on Peacock?
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
Spidey was one of the first mainstream Marvel characters to get the big screen treatment. It only stands to reason it was one of the first to get a reboot, as well. Following Sam Raimi’s trilogy and the subsequent explosion in comic book film popularity, Sony unveiled a new vision for the masked webslinger in 2012.
Andrew Garfield stars as the titular Spider-Man and his more mundane teenage alter ego, Peter Parker. Emma Stone co-stars as Parker’s friend, confidant, and romantic interest Gwen Stacy. The film covers many of the same plot points as its predecessor –– the death of Uncle Ben, the acquisition of superhuman abilities, and lessons learned about power and responsibility –– but through a different lens.
For better or worse, some of the wackier comic book elements are filed off, leaving a more grounded and emotional tale centering on the mystery that claimed the lives of Parker’s parents and an army of reptilian mutants.
HAPPY DEATH DAY & HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U
It’s your birthday and you can die if you want to. This 2017 horror comedy stars Jessica Rothe as Tree Gelbman, a college student stuck in a homicidal time loop. On her way to a surprise birthday party, Tree is lured into a tunnel and murdered by a hooded figure wearing a baby mask. Then she wakes up, very much alive, and back at the beginning of the day.
She goes through the day again, reliving all of the same experiences, but avoiding the tunnel and the murderer. She arrives safely at the party, only to be killed by the same hooded figure. The cycle continues as Tree relives the same day over and over, always ending with her violent death. The only way to get out is to find the killer and stop them before it’s too late.
A 2019 sequel entitled Happy Death Day 2U brings back the same cast of characters and explains the source of the time loop: a series of temporal experiments carried out by a quantum reactor. Things only get weirder from there, pushing the characters and the story into a Sliders-like multiverse mystery of cosmic proportions.
THE CORNETTO TRILOGY
The Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, commonly called the Cornetto trilogy, is a series of comedic genre mashups from director Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Simon Pegg. Each film in the trilogy stars comedic pals Pegg and Nick Frost alongside a rogue’s gallery of costars.
The series began with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, a hilarious (but still brutal and heartbreaking) turn on the zombie genre. It continued with 2007’s Hot Fuzz, starring Pegg and Frost as a couple of cops in the small town of Sandford, Gloucestershire. Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg) misses his old beat in the city and hates working in Sandford, where nothing ever happens. At least until a series of murders unearth an even weirder underground conspiracy.
The trilogy wrapped up with 2013’s The World’s End, which follows a group of childhood friends on a pub crawl called the Golden Mile. The crawl features a total of 12 pubs, finishing up at World’s End. Sadly for the festivities, about a third of the way through the crawl, our heroes discover that much of the town has been replaced by android doppelgangers bent on assimilating humanity.
PAUL
Pegg and Frost emerged as a hilarious comedy duo at the turn of the century in the short-lived comedy series Spaced. They would hit the mainstream a few years later with the release of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End. Though narratively unrelated, the trio of films are affectionately called the Cornetto Trilogy, and they’re all streaming on Peacock, to boot (see above).
Pegg and Frost, however, have worked together on a number of other projects including the sci-fi road trip movie Paul. Co-written by Pegg and Frost, the story follows a pair of self-described geeks on a UFO themed road trip ending at San Diego Comic-Con. Along the way, they encounter Paul (Seth Rogen), an extraterrestrial who takes them on an out of this world adventure.
US
This simply named horror film is the 2019 follow-up to Jordan Peele’s breakout hit Get Out. The simplicity of its title, however, hides a delightfully complex and horrifying story. It begins in 1986, when a young Adelaide Thomas visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her family.
During a visit to the house of mirrors, she finds a copy of herself, not a reflection but something much more sinister. The event was so traumatizing that Adelaide didn’t speak for years after. Decades later, we return to find an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) on her way to another vacation with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two children.
That’s when Adelaide’s double returns, only this time she’s not alone. The doppelganger, known as Red, has a family of her own, and they want the life Adelaid and her family have. More than that, there are doubles for everyone on Earth. They call themselves the Tethered… and they are mad.
THE THING
There’s something inherently frightening about Antarctica. Going there, to the fringes of our world, the only place too cold for our species to set up permanent residence, means stepping outside of our domain. It’s off the map, as it were, the sort of place you might find monsters.
John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror The Thing explores that concept in terrifying detail. The story follows helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) on an Antarctic expedition, when the crew finds a downed alien spacecraft buried in the ice. Only, the ship wasn’t empty and an alien organism escapes, infecting anything living and taking its place.
Now, MacReady and his colleagues are all that stand between the ravenous body-snatching alien and the rest of humanity. And they don’t know who, if anyone, they can trust.
PUSH
Chris Evans’ most famous superhero role is undoubtedly that of Steve Rogers and Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s far from his only one. Evans also played Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in a duo of Fantastic Four films in 2005 and 2007.
Between those two roles, Evans portrayed a down-on-his-luck super in the 2009 film Push. For decades, humans have been emerging with seemingly superhuman psychic abilities. There are Movers, those who can move objects with their minds, and Watchers who can see the future before it occurs, as well as people who can use energy either as a weapon or to heal. Government entities identify and track these individuals, forcing them to undergo often fatal experiments to boost their abilities.
It’s a world in which those with special abilities are used, abused, and ultimately killed. And it’s up to Nick (Evans) and Cassie (Dakota Fanning) to set things right.
THEY LIVE
John Carpenter’s 1988 science-fiction classic They Live presents a world in which all of our most feared conspiracy theories are true. Our avatar to the story is a drifter named Nada (Roddy Piper) looking for work in Los Angeles. During his search, he encounters a street preacher warning of the wicked machinations of a nebulous “they.” It’s the sort of thing you see in most major cities and usually disregard. Nada may have disregarded it too, if not for what happened later.
A strange television broadcast claims that subliminal messages and hidden signals are controlling our behavior. Nada becomes embroiled in a secret plot to save humanity and gains a pair of special sunglasses which reveal the subliminal messages and the skull-faced aliens living among us.
They are making us overconsume, pollute our planet, and fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses in an attempt to transform our planet into something closer to their own. The more we think about it, the more this is starting to make sense. If it isn’t aliens, then we must be making all of those decisions on our own.
HOLLOW MAN
The 2000 science-fiction thriller Hollow Man is loosely based on the H.G. Wells story The Invisible Man. It stars Kevin Bacon as Dr. Sebastian Cain, a stand in for Wells’ Griffin character. Cain and his team are working on a secret government project to create an invisibility serum for use by the military. As the story begins, they’ve just succeeded at turning a gorilla invisible and returning it to visibility.
Cain should report the success to his superiors, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lies and pressures his team to begin human testing. Their first subject: Dr. Cain himself. Their serum succeeds in making Cain invisible, but when they try to make him visible again something goes wrong.
The longer Cain remains invisible, the more he separates from reality, thinking himself a god. And he’s loose in the lab — nay, loose in the world — and no one outside even knows he exists.
SLITHER
Before he gave us the Guardians of the Galaxy or took over the DC Extended Universe alongside Peter Safran, James Gunn gave us Slither, his 2006 feature film directorial debut. It tells the story of a small town, and a malicious alien entity transported there on a meteor.
After arriving in Wheelsy, South Carolina, the body snatching space slug begins infecting and taking over the townspeople, beginning with powerful local Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). Grant’s wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks), Police Chief Bill (Nathan Fillion), Mayor Jack MacReady (Gregg Henry), and local teenager Kylie Strutemyer (Tania Saulnier) are the last line of defense preventing humanity from being absorbed into an increasingly grotesque alien hive mind.
KNOWING
If you throw a dart at Nicolas Cage’s filmography there’s no way of knowing if you’re going to get a heartwarming and serious film or one of the weirdest movie experiences of your life. One thing you can be sure of, though, is that you’re going to have a good time. Knowing falls somewhere in the middle of the Cage Camp Continuum and sees him playing a mathematician who discovers a sequence of numbers which accurately predicts major disasters.
After banging his head against this apocalyptic sudoku puzzle he realizes the numbers identify the date, planetary coordinates, and body count of every major disaster going back centuries. There are only a few dates left before the end of the sequence, and with it, the end of the world.
LUCY
Lucy took some heat when it first hit theaters, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see it for what it is — a wacky sci-fi romp that’s as fun as it is unrealistic — even if that’s not what we expected or wanted when it dropped.
Lucy’s greatest scientific sin is leaning all the way into the disproven idea that we only use a portion of our brains. When Lucy (Scarlet Johansson) is accidentally exposed to an experimental drug, she gains enhanced mental and physical abilities as more of her brain is unlocked. By the end of the movie, she’s become so powerful that she is impervious to injury or pain and capable of psychically traveling through time. It’s the sort of movie brave enough to see the horizon of credulity and blithely traipse across it; and for that, we love it.
ALIENS ABDUCTED MY PARENTS AND NOW I FEEL KINDA LEFT OUT
Teenagers Calvin (Jacob Buster) and Itsy (Emma Tremblay) are unlikely friends growing up in a small town. Itsy is new, having just moved with her family from the big city, while Calvin has lived there all his life and become something of a town pariah.
Ten years earlier, Calvin’s folks disappeared during the once-a-decade appearance of the fictional comet Jesper. Calvin becomes convinced that his mom and dad were snatched up by alien visitors and that he’ll be able to join them when the comet returns. His entire life becomes a preparation for the imminent reappearance of the comet.
What follows is a heartfelt sci-fi coming of age story from screenwriter Austin Osanai Everett and director Jake Van Wagoner that is both out of this world and totally grounded right here on Earth.
DONNIE DARKO
Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic, Donnie Darko, continues to demand rewatches and command late-night barguments two decades after release. Set in 1988, the titular Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is awoken by a mysterious voice. Following it, he encounters a creepy, humanoid rabbit named Frank who tells Donnie the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Strange as that encounter was, it saved Donnie from certain death when an airplane engine crashed into his bedroom. From there, a bizarre series of events unfolds involving tangent universes, multiverse artifacts, time traveling ghosts, and the entangled fates of one boy and the entire universe.
APOLLO 18
NASA’s Apollo program came to a close in 1972 with the successful return of Apollo 17. The program ended early, scrapping three planned crewed missions, Apollos 18 - 20. The history books will tell you that’s where things ended but director Gonzalo López-Gallego imagined an alternate history in the 2011 found footage film Apollo 18.
After Apollo officially ended, the 18th mission was reactivated as a Top Secret Department of Defense mission to deliver a classified payload to the Moon’s South Pole. The deadly events that follow go a long way to explaining why the footage was buried and the mission never spoken of. If you know the Moon landings happened but still want a little conspiracy, as a treat, this is the movie for you.
TURBO KID
Turbo Kid isn’t, strictly speaking, a vision of the future, but we’ll let it slide because it’s INCREDIBLE. It takes place in an alternate reality 1997, in a world struggling for water. The tyrannical overlord Zeus (played perfectly by Michael Ironside) captures people from the Wasteland and crushes them to get their water. It’s a tough world to live in when you’re a kid who just wants to ride his bike and read comic books.
When The Kid meets Apple, a friendship model robot, the two of them embark on a coming-of-age story like none you’ve ever seen. It’s equal parts Napoleon Dynamite and Mad Max, with a disturbingly hilarious amount of blood splatter. It’s a post-apocalyptic fever dream as imagined by a Power Glove-wearing teenager from the ‘80s. It’s perfect.
EUROPA REPORT
Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons (the so-called Galilean moons) and it’s covered in a global sheet of ice. Beneath that ice, thanks to the tidal forces between Europa, Jupiter, and its dozens of other moons, is a world-spanning ocean of liquid water. Research suggests activity at the surface transports oxygen and salts into the water, and seafloor vents could provide a source of nutrients and heat. With a bit of luck, life could spring up there and thrive in a lightless ocean world.
Europa Report imagines the sort of mission we dream of, sending brave explorers to an alien world to see it for themselves. Sadly, things don’t go to plan. That’s clear from the jump, because the story is narrated not by any of the crewmembers, but by the CEO of Europa Ventures, Dr. Samantha Unger. A crewed mission is sent to the icy moon, looking for life. In space, you should be careful what you wish for.
Upon landing, they drill through the ice and release a probe. One crew member sees a blue light in the distance but is dismissed as being sleep deprived. All doubt evaporates when the underwater probe sees a similar light just moments before being destroyed. There’s life on Europa, alright, and it isn’t happy.
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000
You never know what a new day might bring. If you’re very unlucky you might be kidnapped by a group of mad scientists, shuttled aboard an interstellar spacecraft, and forced to watch bad movies until your connection with reality shatters. If you find yourself in that situation, it helps to have a few friends.
When Joel Robinson found himself in this exact unlikely but hilarious situation, and without any friends, he built some from scratch using pieces of the ship. Those friends are known as Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and GPC. And they, along with the human test subject (first Joel, then a smattering of other folks over time), watch bad movies and crack wise to make them a little less painful. The great thing about Mystery Science Theater 3000, is it isn’t just one bad movie, but so many. So many, that eventually they start to look pretty good.
UPSIDE DOWN
Juan Diego Solanas’ 2012 film Upside Down, blurs the lines between science fiction and fantasy to tell a cosmic love story only possible in our imaginations. We enter the worlds of Upside Down through the eyes of Adam (Jim Sturgess). He’s an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances, a citizen of a binary planet system with an impossible gravitational relationship.
The two worlds, known only as Up and Down, share a gravitational field, allowing them to orbit in incredibly close proximity to one another. But that doesn’t mean that residents of the two worlds travel freely between them. On these worlds, matter adheres to a few seemingly inalienable rules. First and most important, all matter is only attracted to the gravity of its home world. Second, matter can be counterbalanced by “inverse” matter from the opposing world. Finally, contact with inverse matter is temporary and results in spontaneous combustion after a few hours.
Adam might have been satisfied to live out his life on one world, but when he meets Eden, a woman from Up, they set about rewriting both the laws of their society and the laws of physics.
Stream these great sci-fi movies and many more on Peacock!
